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RESEARCH STUDENTSHIPS IN THE SCHOOL OF COMPUTING

Proposed MSc. and PhD. projects:

Infrastructures for Virtual Teaching and Learning Environments Software Project Management and Software Process Improvement
Infrastructure for the delivery of adaptive learning objects Computational Modelling
Automatic Construction of Data Types
Automatic Logic Program Construction
Automatic Program Parallelisation
Automatic Program Verification
Secure Mobile Code
Learning Evaluation Functions in Computer Games from a Corpus of Expert Games
Integrated Peer Reviews with Tool Support Concatenative Speech Synthesis Based on a Sinusoidal Model
Analysing, Indexing, Browsing, Searching, Abstracting and Linking Digital Video Information Development of improved sample selection methods for skewed populations
Development of improved methods of estimation in financial auditing
Applications of Mathematica in SW Engineering Sign Language Recognition from Video Images
Business Information Systems Quality (BISQ) Speech-Related Projects
World-Wide Mind Advanced Mobile and Ad Hoc Network Privacy and Security
Formal Verification of Mobile Distributed Systems Generating behavioural specifications from semi-formal design methodologies
Computer Go Multilingual Treebank-Based Probabilistic Unification Grammar Acquisition
Multimedia Information Retrieval
Multilingual Information Retrieval
Automated Information Linking
Composition in Service-oriented Architectures
Setting records for discrete logarithms  
 

 Applicants should complete a graduate application form, indicating the areas of interest, and return it as soon as possible to:

Dr. Martin Crane,
School of Computing,
Dublin City University,
Glasnevin, Dublin 9,
IRELAND.

Tel: +353 1 7008974 Fax: +353 1 7005442
Dr. Martin Crane

Setting records for discrete logarithms

The aim of this project is to use high-powered computing resources (a computer grid) to set new records for the calculation of discrete logarithms, in a variety of settings. This is important, as the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem is the basis for many method of Cryptography. There is SFI funding available for 2 Ph.D. positions - a total stipend of 24,000 Euros per year for 3 years, plus a generous travel allowance.

Requirements: Good spoken English and ideally a Master's degree in Mathematics, Engineering or Computer Science, but a good honours degree may suffice. Some background in Cryptography and/or number theory would be an advantage.

If you are interested in this project or a related area please contact Dr. Mike Scott.

Sign Language Recognition from Video Images

We are developing algorithms to recognise human body movements and hand shapes in video images. We hope to combine this with facial expression recognition and lip-reading to produce a full-scale Sign Language recognition system. The algorithms we are using depend on ideas from the field of statistical pattern matching. The following link contains background information

http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~ashamaie/mvg/

We are looking for people who have an interest in either machine vision and pattern recognition, or in computational lingustics and speech. One possible avenue of research would be to adapt techniques used in spoken language recognition to Sign language. We would particulary welcome applications from the Irish Sign Language community.

If you are interested in this project or a related area please contact Dr. Alistair Sutherland.

Infrastructures for Virtual Teaching and Learning Environments

The current undergraduate introduction to databases is taught as a virtual course. Advanced virtual courses based on Web- and Internet-technologies will include different kind of media such as audio or video in addition to text and images, interactive elements will be provided for different parts of the course allowing students to train skills within the virtual system. XML will form the key technology for the design and implementation such such systems. The objective of this research is to investigate concepts, models and techniques for advanced virtual course environments and show their feasibility in an existing system.

Composition in Service-oriented Architectures

The Web Services Framework is a recent example of a service-oriented architecture. The composition of these services to complex software systems is currently not thoroughly investigated.
This research project aims to investigate ontology technologies, e.g. developed by the Semantic Web Initiative, to support the composition of services. The ontological description of services is expected to be a major contributor to successful composition techniques for Web-based software development. In this environment, the actual composition (through connection of interacting services) is preceded by the identification of services from repositories that match given requirements.

If you are interested in these projects or a related area please contact Dr. Claus Pahl.

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Infrastructure for the delivery of adaptive learning objects

The project focuses on an adaptive learning objects infrastructure for computer programming courses. A range of interactive learning objects shall support the personalised selection and delivery of content in introductory programming. The proposed project shall address in particular the evaluation of this approach:

  • From a technical viewpoint, the suitability of SCORM-based learner management systems for these learning objects shall be investigated. Special attention shall be given to interactivity and adaptivity.
  • From an educational perspective, the effectiveness of personalised selection and delivery of learning object for selected computer programming topics for specific learning situations shall be evaluated.

This M.Sc. project is part of the EU SOCRATES/MINERVA-supported TUPULO (Teaching Undergraduate Programming Using Learning Objects) project. This project aims at producing a range of learning objects that will be used to supplement courses at various institutions. The Moodle learner management system is the targeted infrastructure.

A successful candidate

  • should have knowledge of learner management systems such as Moodle,
  • programming experience in Java and php.
Experience in learning objects design is desirable. Teaching experience in programming subjects would also be beneficial.

If you are interested in these projects or a related area please contact Nora Brophy or Dr. Claus Pahl for more details.

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Integrated Peer Reviews with Tool Support

Use of peer reviews during software development is widely accepted as beneficial - improved estimation of cost & schedule, fewer defects in released software. But, in practice, the efficiency and effectiveness of peer reviews is often unsatisfactory; they may even be abandoned under the pressures of real projects. Common difficulties include inadequate preparation by reviewers and poor linkage to a version control system. This project's goal is to devise a practical and effective model for conducting peer reviews with identification of effective supporting tools. A key output will be a system demonstration, including the important case of remotely located participants.

Applications of Mathematica in SW Engineering, including symbolic execution & testing

A specific project is to build a system to support investigation of the possibility of automatically generating test data to ensure "adequate" coverage of a piece of well-defined code or pseudo code. Here "adequate" would include at least "statement coverage" and "condition/decision coverage" but also, perhaps, "modified condition/decision coverage" (see RTCA/DO-178B). The system would probably comprise of web-based front-end process to check the syntax of the code/pseudo-code under analysis translation of the code/pseudo-code into a Mathematica readable form interface to Mathematica application of Mathematica to display logical paths through the code/pseudo-code, and especially to generate specific test data corresponding to logical decision points. (possibly) pre-processor to convert the logic in the code/pseudo-code to a suitable equivalent form or, alternatively, to restrict the logical structure that can be handled. In the first place, at least, it is expected that the system would not be completely automatic but, instead, would support and require user interaction. More generally, the research could be extended to look at the wider possibilities of Mathematica as a tool in software engineering of critical systems, especially for system specification, modelling and (early) verification.

If you are interested in these projects or a related area please contact Dr. Liam Tuohey

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Computational Modelling of Cellular Systems/Networks; applications to physical/biological and socio-economic systems, including Econophics/traffic flow.

Materials with cellular structure appear in many guises in fields such as engineering and physics,(particularly statistical and condensed matter physics), biology, ecology and so on. Equally,representation of a population of organisms, infected individuals, financial units, vehicles on a street etc.as occupied "cells" in a lattice, with behaviour defined by local rules or in terms of network interactions and adjustments, provide numerous cross-disciplinary analogies. These systems, owing to their complexity and large number of component elements, are rarely amenable to analytical solutions, but may be addressed through computational modelling and/or simulation techniques or statistical analysis. Projects available include applications of computational modelling to specific systems, together with more abstract studies of the techniques used. As follows:

(1) Traffic Flow and Intelligent Traffic Mapping Ph.D.

The aim of the research is to examine the influence of choice and available information on flow of urban and inter-urban traffic through a road network. Various protoype models have been developed, which have focused on investigation of the mechanisms, which govern entry and passage through urban features, such as intersections and simple roundabouts, loss to flow and so on. These have initially dealt with homogeneous vehicles and restricted conditions, (uncontrolled flow). The intent is to extend and develop these models for heterogeneity and control of flow, incorporating stochastic features, such as driver behaviour, obstruction and loss to flow amongst others, with a view to provision of feedback for "intelligent" traffic mapping. Aspects of system intelligence and control will be explored.

 (2) Ageing, Competition and the Mutation Load; Extinction of large populations. M.Sc.

This project will look at the spatio-temporal evolution of finite populations, with and without sexual reproduction, under growth curtailment or enhancement due to mutation, competition and ageing. The parameters of Mutational Meltdown will be explored for asexual and sexual populations, using both Monte-Carlo and cellular automata techniques, for models adapted from those of e.g. Penna and Redfield, (1994,1995 and subsequently).

 (3) Financial Modelling: Ph.D.

The large literature on real business cycles emphasises the calibration of models to explain the variance and covariance of macroeconomic variables. The leverage effect (increase in volatilities for asset price drops) has been much studied over recent years, where this increase has been shown to apply for different forecasting horizons, dependent on whether studies focus on the volatility in auto-correlations of actual stock prices or those of index data. The joint movements of random variables act as a check and balance on generation and propagation mechanisms in financial markets and the economy generally and invite parallels with the study of volatility in physical system microstructures. In the latter, the aim is usually to determine laws, which describe how volatility varies with the scale of measurement and similar principles can be exploited for financial systems. In particular, the volatility of stock prices must raise questions about models, which fail to take non-Gaussian statistics into account and various authors have argued for volatility being dependent on cooperative interaction or coherent response. A number of microscopic models have tried to reproduce real market behaviour, but a strength of the approach we propose would, in our view, be the ability to integrate statistical analyses and micro-modelling principles in an exploration of correlation effects in market dynamics, under different cooperation/cohesion assumptions. In particular, if rational agents respond to early signs of market change, (based e.g. on predictions of time series models and analyses of eigenvalue change), buying-frenzies and bubbles may occur infrequently and market volatility be reduced or self-organizing features observed.

 (4) Properties of 3-D foams. Ph.D.

This project consists of extending current work on modelling 2-D froths and foams, as idealised cellular networks, to the 3-D case. A prototype Monte Carlo programme has been developed and the first stage of the project will be to evaluate and develop this further for large-scale 2-dimensional systems, which are not straightforward to model directly, due to the amount of detailed information which must be retained. Extension to 3-dimensions is important for analogy with real systems. In particular, the success of alternative indirect simulation models, (such as the MC Potts variant), will be assessed in terms of ability to produce accurate estimates of system properties, such as persistence and self-organization, and to handle specialised geometries. The work will also incorporate visualization aspects for the systems involved. It is expected that this project will offer potential for parallelisation of code on the Modelling and Scientific Computing group distributed cluster. Some travel is expected in years 2 and/or 3.

 (5) Computational Mechanics of C.A. models and their space-time behaviour. M.Sc./Ph.D.

Cellular automata theory provides a basis for exploring numerous phenomena via hierarchical rules and c.a. of various types. Subrules compete in the presence of a master rule in a given hierarchy, the interplay between local and global dynamics is highly variable and results of competition in the rule structures are frequently independent of the master rule choice. Quantitative methods including analysis of pairwise contests and cyclical effects, can be used to demonstrate rule persistence, oscillation etc. in c.a. of various types and will form the basis of this project. Expansion to Ph.D. level of the topic area is also possible.

 (6) Statistical and systematic errors in MC Simulations M.Sc.

An investigation is proposed of the statistical and systematic errors, which arise in MC simulations and their dependence on system size subject to computational time constraints and related conditions. The project will examine causes of system under- and over-estimation of response and the dependence of errors on "bin-length" choice (for the statistical sample) at and away from key system parameter values. Application area-drawn from statistical physics.

 If you are interested in these projects or a related area please contact Dr. Heather Ruskin. I would also be pleased to hear from potential students with an interest in other areas of purely statistical modelling in the natural sciences.
NOTE: If you are interested in project number 3 - Finanical Modelling, please contact Mr. Gary Keogh, Dr. Martin Crane, Dr. Heather Ruskin

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Automatic Construction of Data Types

The distillation program transformation algorithm devised by the proposer of this project automatically transforms programs which may be inefficient into equivalent more efficient programs. The programs which are produced by distillation are given a new algorithmic structure which is more efficient than that of the input program. However, the efficiency of the output program is still constrained by the data types defined within the original input program. The aim of this project is to devise techniques to automatically construct new data types within the output program, thus allowing even more efficient programs to be derived.

Automatic Logic Program Construction

The distillation program transformation algorithm devised by the proposer of this project automatically transforms functional programs which may be inefficient into equivalent more efficient programs. The aim of this project is to adapt this transformation algorithm to the logic programming paradigm, thus allowing the automatic construction of efficient logic programs.

Automatic Program Parallelisation

Programs can be made to run more efficiently in a parallel processing environment if they can exploit the underlying parallel architecture. One approach to doing this is to allow the programmer to explicitly add parallelism into their code. However, this puts an unnecessary burden on the programmer, and the resulting programs can be difficult to prove correct. The aim of this project is to take unparallelised code, and to automatically add parallelism into it which exploits the underlying parallel architecture, thus freeing the programmer from doing this themselves.

Automatic Program Verification

The Poitín theorem prover, written by the proposer of this project, allows the automatic verification of safety properties of programs (in which we can say that nothing bad will ever happen during the execution of the program). The aim of this project is to extend these verification techniques to also allow the verification of liveness properties (in which we can say that something good will eventually happen during the execution of the program) of concurrent programs.

Secure Mobile Code

Proof-carrying code is a technique by which a code consumer can verify that code provided by an untrusted code producer adheres to a security policy. For mobile code, the code consumer would be an Internet host (e.g., a web browser) and the code producer a server that sends applets. The key idea behind proof-carrying code is that the code producer is required to create a formal proof that attests to the fact that the code respects the defined security policy. Then, the code consumer is able to use a simple and fast proof validator to check, with certainty, that the proof is valid and hence the foreign code is safe to execute. The Poitín theorem prover, written by the proposer of this project, can automatically verify that code satisifes a given security policy without the need for a proof to be constructed by the code producer, thus greatly simpliying the distribution of secure mobile code. The aim of this project is to investigate the use of the techniques used by Poitín for the distribution of secure mobile code.


If you are interested in these projects or a related area please contact Dr. Geoff Hamilton

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Multimedia Information Retrieval

Retrieval from multimedia document archives, suggested research areas: multimedia question-answering, multimedia summarization, cross-language and multilingual multimedia information retrieval.

Multilingual Information Retrieval

Retrieval from multilingual document archives, suggested research areas: novel hybrid language translation strategies, collection and result merging strategies for multilingual retrieval.

Automated Information Linking

Detection of similarity and differences between the information contained in documents, linking information from different sources and different media types, applications including novel information browsing and summarization and cross-media document annotation.


If you are interested in these projects or a related area please contact Dr. Gareth Jones

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Development of improved sample selection methods for skewed populations

The research will further develop the recent work of Gunning and Horgan (2004) who addressed the problem of obtaining optimal boundaries in univariate stratification of skewed populations, and showed that an efficient approximation of the intractable Dalenius solution may be obtained using the geometric progression. In this research, it is proposed to construct generalisations of this as follows:

  1. To adapt the algorithm to allow for a take-all stratum;
  2. To develop models to account for the discrepancy between the stratification and survey variables, and to use these with the geometric stratification method;
  3. To adapt the algorithm for multivariate stratification problems for the case where the number of stratification variables is greater than one;
  4. To compare the performance of the new stratification procedures with PPS sampling;
  5. To develop software for implementation of the new developments;

References:
Gunning, P. and Horgan, J.M. (2004). A New Algorithm for the Construction of Stratum Boundaries, Survey Methodology, 30, 2, 1-18.

Development of improved methods of estimation in financial auditing. PhD

This research will concentrate on the development of improved methods of estimation for non-standard mixtures of distributions usual in auditing. The widely-used non-parametric Stringer bound, though reliable, has been found to be conservative for obtaining bounds for the error amount. In the literature several modifications have been proposed (Horgan, 2003), but none as yet have succeeded in reducing the conservatism to a satisfactory level. Other approaches include the use of the Hoeffding's inequalities and the empirical likelihood methodology as a possibility for obtaining bounds for populations with low occurrence rates. Notwithstanding the work that has been done, obtaining reliable tight bounds remains an open problem.

The main aim of this project is:

  1. to critically review and analyse the properties of existing estimators;
  2. to build on the work of Horgan (1997-2003) to develop improved techniques for estimation to audit populations;
  3. to develop software to examine the performance of the new methodologies across a wide range of populations, and to compare them with existing strategies using audit data from the US and Ireland.

References:
Horgan, J.M. (2003)
Horgan , J.M. (1998) Stabilised Sieve Sampling: A Point Estimator Analysis, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, 16, 1, 42-51.
Horgan, J.M. (1997) Stabilising the Sample Size Using PPP, Auditing a Journal of Theory and Practice, American Accounting Association, 16, 2, 40-51
Further references and papers available on my web page:
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~jhorgan

If you are interested in these projects or a related area please contact Prof. Jane Horgan

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Software Project Management and Software Process Improvement

Potential research topics in the area of software engineering include (but are not limited to) supporting the work of software project managers and software developers by the provision of methodologies and support systems such as process and project management tools and techniques. Dr. Rory O'Connor is interested in supervising postgraduate students in researching methods and techniques for supporting the work of software project managers and software developers in relation to software process improvement, software project planning and management of software development projects.

Potential M.Sc. and Ph.D. projects would include the following:

  1. SPI for SME's

  2. Development, tailoring and application of software process models for small and medium-sized software companies. Potential areas within this theme include both the development of exploratory models of software process and cost-benefit analysis of adoption, adaptation and use of improved processes in small companies.

  3. Light Software Process Methods for Internet Development Firms

  4. The development of Internet-based applications (E-commerce systems, web portals, etc.) is subject to different conditions than that of conventional software systems. Such idiosyncrasies include: usability, rapid development lifecycle and short time to market. Traditional SPI methodologies are perceived as being inadequate for dealing with the development of Internet based applications. Accordingly there is a identified need for a overarching SPI framework for use by Internet-based developers. This project would investigate this identified deficiency in field of SPI and develop an SPI framework which is orientated directly towards the needs of Internet based application development in the context of 'young' (start-up) small indigenous software companies, which is capable of being 'tailorable' to the particular stage of organisational development of small 'young' software companies.

  5. Web Development Process and Usability

  6. Successful Web development requires knowledge and skills in many areas, in particular HCI design and usability engineering. I am interested in software development aspects of web systems development and in particular the relationship between the development processes used and the resulting software quality and usability attributes. I would be interesting in hearing from potential postgraduate students who would be interested in investigating the relationships between process, quality and usability of web systems, in an industrial context.

  7. Other potential M.Sc. projects could include:

    1. Development of automated software project management support systems and software process modelling and enaction environments.
    2. Investigation and development of decision models to support project and process management.
    3. Investigation of the use of and application of both eXtreme Programming (XP) and Personal Software Process (PSP) as SPI methods, including the effectiveness of training in these areas.


If you are interested in these projects or a related area please contact Dr. Rory O'Connor

If you would like to know more about current and previous research projects in similar areas, please look at my web site http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~roconnor/roconnor.html

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Advanced Mobile and Ad Hoc Network Privacy and Security

Next generation (3G+) mobile communications will require dynamic infrastructures which will accommodate ad-hoc and mesh network features. The research will address mobility management protocols for good performance in a secure environment. Issues of multiple identities or pseudonyms, to avoid location tracking attacks to be devised. Other forms of attack to be addressed include denial of service attack, non forwarding, traffic deviations, route modifications etc. The research will also lead to devising protocols for securing end to end communications, network access and secure infrastructures across multi hop ad-hoc communications networks. Such protocols are required before mobile or M-commerce applications can become a reality for users of small (mobile phone sized) devices. Applications for access systems, small payment systems and secure. E-cash payment systems will be developed on foot of these problems being overcome. Other organisations involved in this area include Nokia, Ericsson, Vodafone, Siemens, Media Lab Europe, as well as several European Universities and Research Institutes.

If you are interested in this projects or a related area please contact Mr. Brian Stone

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World-Wide Mind

This research would involve constructing Artificial Mind Servers and Artificial World Servers using the Architecture of theWorld Wide Mind. Investigation and development of algorithms and models which facilitate the solving of Large Scale AI Problems using the decentralised processing structure of the World Wide Mind Architecture would be a key element of the work. Arbitrating Agents would have to allocate fitness (weights) to solutions from Multiple Minds and facilitate further layers of arbitration and selection. More Information can be imported from http://w2mind.org

If you are interested in this projects or a related area please contact Ray Walshe or Mark Humphrys

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Speech-Related Projects

Dr. John McKenna is interested in supervising projects on the following speech-related topics:

  • Machine-learning of speaker-characteristic speech dynamics and interactions
  • Stochastic Tracking/Filtering of Speech
  • Voice Transformation
  • Educational Tools using Speech Technology

Further information is available at http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~john/research.html
Or you can contact me directly at John McKenna

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Concatenative Speech Synthesis Based on a Sinusoidal Model

In concatenative text-to-speech (TTS) systems, segments of natural speech are retrieved from a database at synthesis time and prosodically modifed (pitch- and/or time-scaled), concatenated and smoothed to produce speech. Approaches to speech-coding based on sinusoidal modelling have been shown to allow the straightforward implementation of good quality prosodic modification and smoothing algorithms. Initially, this project will involve the development of a sinusoidal model-based back-end for the Festival speech synthesis system. This will be followed by research aimed at developing improved approaches to prosodic modification and novel smoothing techniques based on salient measurements of discontinuity.

If you are interested in this projects or a related area please contact Dr. Darragh O'Brien

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Business Information System Quality (BISQ)

Regarding the importance of information quality in business information systems the scientific community has paid little attention on this topic, so far. Only a few researchers have recently or are currently focusing on data quality management (DQM). But, even if data quality plays a very crucial role in information systems, research at present still lacks methods and techniques for data quality management, especially defining, assessing and improving data quality in multi-organisational business information systems. The problem still remains:

  • How to ensure high-level data quality in Business Information Systems?
The BISQ research project objective is to establish a comprehensive method for proactive data quality management, in order to achieve high-level data quality in business information systems.

If you are interested in this projects or a related area please contact Dr. Markus Helfert or see his project page for more information.

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Analysing, Indexing, Browsing, Searching, Abstracting and Linking Digital Video Information

The Centre for Digital Video Processing is a collaboration between the School of Computing and the School of Electronic Engineering in DCU. We currently have funding from Science Foundation Ireland (investigator award), Enterprise Ireland ATRP2002 programme (LOEUVRE project), Enterprise Ireland Technology Development programme 2003 (MediAssist project), EU FP5 Network of Excellence (SCHEMA), EU FP6 Integrated Project (aceMedia), the Department of Education and Science, several IRCSET scholarships and from Dublin City University.

The Centre consists of 7 academic staff, 6 full-time post-doctoral researchers, 20 full-time PhD students, and 2 support personnel. Over the last half-dozen years we have developed sets of tools to record, analyse, browse, index, search, summarise and play information in digital video format. Our interest lies in content-based access to digital video, and digital image, information.

Because of the open nature and wide range of the problems we address, and because of our funding base, a number of M.Sc. and PhD positions are available. Some information on projects carried out as part of the CDVP Undergraduate Research Project Scheme is available here and a listing of publications from the centre is available here and this gives a better indication of the kinds of projects we do.

Further information is available at http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~asmeaton/projects2003.htm

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Formal Verification of Mobile Distributed Systems

Modern society has become reliant on software systems for many mission-critical and life-critical functions. Very little of this software has been proven to be correct and error-free despite our vulnerability to these software systems. One approach to verification of these software systems is to use formal mathematical logics and theorem provers. This project will investigate the use of the pi-calculus and term-rewriting for the specification and verification of distributed and embedded systems. The basic idea is to take a property of the system to be verified and using a weakest precondition semantics of the pi-calculus, that will be developed as part of the project, to generate the required preconditions on the system for this property to hold.


Generating behavioural specifications from semi-formal design methodologies

UML is a popular design notations used in industry. The typical usage of UML is as a semi-formal graphical description of the system to be developed. The lack of logical/mathematical formality means that multiple interpretation of the same set of diagrams is possible and there is no way of verifying that a system behaves in a specified manner. The introduction of the Object Constraint Language, OCL, has provided a means by which a UML diagram can be annotated with constraints on the objects in the system. These constraints are in the form of preconditions, postconditions and invariants. By themselves they do not enable a behavioural specification of the system. This project will investigate whether a combination the UML state diagram, message sequence charts etc. (with restrictions) can be mapped in to a behavioural description of the system that is suitable for verification.


Computer Go

This project will examine strategic planning in games by investigating how computers and play the game of Go. The history of the game Go stretches back 4000 years and the game has essentially remained unchanged. It is a territorial game played on a board marked with a 19x19 grid, on which players place coloured stones. The winner is the player who has encircled the most space. Despite these, and other simple rules, the game of Go is strategically rich and has posed many problems for computers. The standard of the best Go programs are that of average amateurs. The search techniques developed for Computer Chess will not work. Computer Go represents many challenges in relation to strategy formulation, planning and evaluation.


Learning Evaluation Functions in Computer Games from a Corpus of Expert Games

To date computers' most successful approach to games such as chess is a combination of search and evaluation. While a lot of research effort has been invested in developing better search algorithms the evaluation functions have been largely ignored. The focus of this project is to investigate different techniques for training an evaluation function from a large corpus of games played by expert. As part of this project multi-dimensional evaluation functions and their resolution mechanisms will be compared against 1-dimensional evaluation functions.

Further information is available at:
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~davids/pg_research_project.htm

If you are interested in this projects or a related area please contact Dr. David Sinclair

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Multilingual Treebank-Based Probabilistic Unification Grammar Acquisition

Traditionally unification grammars such as LFG and HPSG were hand coded. This is extremely time-consuming, expensive and requires extensive linguistic expertise. Over the last few years here at DCU we have developed a methodology to automatically acquire wide-coverage, robust, probabilistic unification grammar resources from treebanks (parse anotated corpora). We have acquired extensive, high-quality LFG resources for English [1] from the Penn-II treebank and German [2] from the Tiger treebank. We are now looking into migrating our methodology to Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, French to generate wide-coverage resources for these languages. We are also planning to extend our previous work on German. If you are a native (or near native speaker) of Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, French or German and if you have a strong background in computing (good programming) and an interest or background in language, linguistics, natural language processing or computational linguistics then please get in touch.

References:

[1] "Parsing with PCFGs and Automatic F-Structure Annotation", Aoife Cahill, Mairead McCarthy, Josef van Genabith and Andy Way, The 7th International Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference, LFG'02, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece, 2002, Proceedings of the Conference, (eds.) Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA, ISSN 1098-6782, CA, http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~josef/publications.html

[2] "Treebank-Based Multilingual Unification-Grammar Development", Cahill A., M. Forst, M. McCarthy, R. O' Donovan, C. Rohrer, J. van Genabith and A. Way, in the Proceedings of the Workshop on Ideas and Strategies for Multilingual Grammar Development, at the 15th European Summer School in Logic Language and Information, Vienna, Austria, 18th - 29th August 2003 2003, http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~josef/publications.html


If you are interested in this projects or a related area please contact Prof. Josef van Genabith

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Information on this page is maintained by Prof. Heather Ruskin